


ain’t no grave (can hold my body down)

by ohallows



Series: podcast girls week 2020 [6]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: (this gets slightly dark because fear avatars), Alternate Universe, Angst, Buried Alive, Claustrophobia, F/F, Not Really Character Death, TMA crossover, buried azu meets vast sasha, suffocation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25202935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohallows/pseuds/ohallows
Summary: Azu is 18 years old when the crushing confines of the dirt pushing in against her becomes a comfort.
Relationships: Azu/Sasha Racket
Series: podcast girls week 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1820245
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20
Collections: Podcast Girls Week





	ain’t no grave (can hold my body down)

**Author's Note:**

> mild warning for character death, kind of dark, it’s tma so like. yk. this is also very different than anything i’ve ever written before so. yeah. i’ve never actually written any form of horror before? so this is v much so a first attempt.

Azu is five years old when she realises that she’s terrified of the dark. She  _ knew  _ before, of course, in the way all children know that a monster lives under their bed and that the evil demon in the closet was out to get them. But that’s a different kind of terror - a terror of the unknown, of something coming to get you in the night. Something  _ unseen _ , teeth clacking and jaws dripping with blood. It’s less a fear of the dark and more a fear of the endless list of things you can imagine living in there, waiting for the perfect moment to snatch you up and drag you into the dark with it. They’re all afraid of the darkness, of the absence of light. Of what stalks around where light refuses to tread.

Azu doesn’t have to imagine what’s in the dark waiting to take her away. She  _ knows.  _ She has a reason to be afraid of the dark, one that none of her friends in the village seem to understand. 

It was meant to be a joke. Emeka shoved her in the closet, small and tight so that the walls pressed against Azu’s shoulders no matter how she moved. She could feel the walls wrapping around her slowly, trying to move closer and closer and  _ press  _ her, squish her between them because they wanted her to be  _ part  _ of them, and Azu had screamed and screamed and  _ screamed  _ until Mama had heard her and pulled open the closet door and found Azu, curled up in a ball on the floor and sobbing. 

She had hated every single small space after that. Even her room would sometimes feel too cramped, and she would sit and think about how the walls felt, pushing against her skin, and she would have to leave, escape, because she could feel the walls coming to take her away. She would go sit right outside their door, no matter the time of night, and be comforted by the fact that there were no walls in sight, no walls that could consume her. 

The dark is like that. There’s a pressure in the darkness, when it’s so dark that you can’t see the walls slowly moving to encase you, to suffocate you until you’re part of them. Azu hates the dark, because in the dark, you don’t know where the walls are, even if you reach out. She refuses to sleep without a small light beside her bed, so that she can remind herself that the walls aren’t slowly getting smaller and smaller and  _ smaller,  _ and pretend as though they aren’t watching her with hungry eyes. 

—

Azu is eight years old when she feels the dirt crushing in on all sides of her, when she falls down, down,  _ down, down  _ into the dirt, when Emeka’s panicked scream of her name is cut off by the dirt surrounding her, crushing her down and pressing in, filling her mouth and choking her and  _ hurting  _ her, and then she’s stuck, unmoving, unsure of which way is left or right or up or down and all she can do is wait in the dark, in the silence, in the absolute stillness of the dirt. She feels like she’s fifty feet below the surface as the pressure grows, and she can’t even feel the disturbance of the dirt above her, as if no one’s even looking. As though she’s been abandoned to the dirt.

The fear spikes through her chest as the minutes stretch to become hours, to become days, and she’s too young to realise that this isn’t how time passes, even as she spends weeks, months,  _ years  _ in the dirt, trapped and unable to move and  _ terrified.  _ There’s no sound, no movement, and Azu can’t even cry for how terrified she is, for the sense of abandonment settling thick in her chest. 

She’s pulled out eventually, but Azu never forgets the feeling of the dirt packing her in, making her  _ part  _ of it. Emeka pulls her into a hug, and even that is too close, she can’t  _ breathe _ , and she struggles away from him to lay on the ground and stare up at the sky. The dirt underneath her moves again, and Azu hates it, hates how she can  _ feel  _ the dirt still all around her, packing her in. The air brushing against her skin is a comfort as she breathes, and Emeka hovers over, no longer too close, and Azu lays there, trying to ignore the sound of the dirt in her ears.

It plagues her nightmares after that, memories of being stuck in the dark, in the dirt, playing over and over again in her mind. In the nightmares, she’s pulled down, down,  _ down,  _ farther then she’d fallen, and the dirt suffocates her as she’s pulled down by an invisible grip on her ankle, through the dirt until there’s no hope of ever reaching the sky again. 

Emeka always wakes her up from the nightmares; she thinks she has nightmares about it too, really, about losing Azu as she’s pulled into the earth and not being able to do anything to save her. But he’s learned since the first time he woke her up and she scrambled away to sit in the center of the room, as far away from the walls as possible (she can’t go outside anymore, not at night, not alone, because what if the dirt tries to take her again?). Now, he just sits with his back to the door, a silent guardian in the night. 

Neither of them get much sleep, these days. 

—

Azu is 18 years old when the crushing confines of the dirt pushing in against her becomes a comfort.

She had been hiking with friends, high up in the mountains of Kenya, when there’d been a terrifying noise from above them, loud rumbles and trees splintering and animals howling, and Azu had only had a second to look at her friends, horrified, before they’d started sprinting, trying to get as far away from there as fast as they could. No matter how fast they ran, it didn’t matter; the rocks came and covered them all, before long. They were knocked down the side of the mountain as the landslide of rocks and mud and water and dust engulfed them, burying them, and then everything was silent save for the rumbling of the mountain as more and more and  _ more  _ dirt piled over them, until the pressure above them became unbearable. 

Azu doesn’t even try to move, to scream, and the only reason she isn’t hyperventilating is because of the dirt and mud that will open her mouth the second she tries. She’s slowly suffocating, stuck there under the dirt as more presses in against her, and her mind flashes to the closet, to the sinkhole, and she can’t even move as it slides against her body, pressure growing as it packs in around her, sticks to her skin and clothes and makes her  _ part  _ of the dirt. 

She realises it’s been chasing her, after her for as long as she’s been alive, and that realisation brings with it almost a sense of calm. The dirt stops moving and she’s left bereft; she should have already run out of air, but for some reason, she’s still able to breathe. Her eyes are squeezed shut, and she tries to feel through the dirt, to feel any struggling from her friends, to feel anyone searching for them above, but there’s nothing. The only thing she knows is the dirt around her, insistent, cloying,  _ pressing.  _ There’s no sound, nothing, a sensory deprivation experience that terrifies Azu to her very core. The terror starts to reach a crescendo point, and Azu tries to scream, but there are little black dots in her vision from lack of air (finally, this should have happened a long time ago) and the terror starts to fade as  _ everything  _ starts to fade. Her arms grow weak at her sides, and she realises that she’s going to be trapped here in the dark, in the dirt, forever. 

But… the dirt is pressing in even more, asking a question, asking to be let in, and Azu finally gives in, lets the dirt enter her mouth, and takes a breath. Her heartbeat stops, but Azu doesn’t, and she no longer wants to rise above the dirt. 

The dirt, the mud, the soil… it clings to her, now, becomes her, and she is  _ pulled  _ into it, made a part of it, and she wonders why she ever resisted in the first place. 

—

Azu is 20 years old, and she is the thing that people fear in the dark. Dirt and soil drips off of her fingertips, caked to her skin. The surface is something she cares little about; she needs the suffocation of the dirt around her, the way that she feels welcome in the small tunnels that she carves through the earth as she walks. The walls press in against her, always brushing against her shoulders and  _ squeezing _ , and she doesn’t know why she was ever so afraid of something that’s so  _ comforting.  _ Why would she want space to think, to  _ breathe _ , when the walls are  _ part  _ of her now? She needs the closeness, the pressure, otherwise she would be  _ alone.  _

She doesn’t know what happened to her friends, to her brother. She finds, after a while, that she doesn’t really care about not knowing. Maybe her friends made the same deal, or maybe they’re stuck for an eternity beneath the dirt, trying to scream and claw their way out as tonnes of pressure press down on their bodies, a prison of their own making. She’s happy enough to be left alone, to make her own way through the dirt and the mud and the sand and the  _ tightness _ and let herself enjoy the pressure around herself. 

This doesn’t mean she doesn’t run into people, sometimes. They come looking, they come investigating, they go hiking, they go spelunking, and Azu is always there when one of them gets trapped, when one of them finds themselves too deep into the earth and no idea where to turn, where to run next.

It’s  _ fun,  _ sometimes, to taste the fear on people’s skin when they get too close, when the dirt reaches out to swallow them up too, but Azu never takes a victim. The fear is enough to sate her hunger, and then she lets them run on home and spread the fear to the masses, lets them become afraid of her, of the dirt, of the small inescapable places in the dark, in droves, and she relishes when those who are too  _ strong  _ to be afraid come near and slowly, slowly,  _ slowly  _ realise their mistake. 

—

Azu thinks she’s 22 years old when she falls in love with the sky again. Time doesn’t really exist anymore for her, not really. And, well, it’s not  _ really  _ the sky, but someone in it. 

Her name is Sasha, and she’s everything Azu hates -  _ open air on your skin, feeling the beams of the sunlight pressing into you, nothing but space stretching on and on and on and on and -  _ and everything Azu loves as well -  _ fingers pressing into the dirt in curiosity, the freedom of going wherever you like, bright brown eyes and dark hair and - _ and she knows that Sasha and her are the same, somehow. Brought low by their fears, terrified and horrified and traumatised, and then accepting it, embracing the fear until it becomes a comfort. They’re the same but opposites; Azu embodies the closeness of the dirt, pressing in on all sides of you until each breath is a laboured thing, and Sasha embodies the freedom of the sky, where there’s no pressure and nothing but open air. That terrifies Azu, now, and she didn’t even know that she still  _ could  _ feel fear, but the idea of having nothing between her skin and the open air, of being in freefall forever, does it. Sasha seems scared of her as well, at first, until Azu promises not to drag her beneath the dirt and take her away from the sky, and over time, she relaxes. 

Sasha tells her her story, eventually. Of hating open spaces, of being terrified of falling, and then of her falling forever, so fast and so quickly toward the ground that she was never able to do anything but brace before she cracked. 

Azu watches Sasha, and thinks she might really be in love. 

—

Azu thinks she might be 25 when the sky falls in love with her back. It’s a hesitant thing, of course, both feeding on fear, both being so opposite even as their similarities stand out in a stark light. 

They meet in the middle. Azu learns how to tolerate the open space, within reason, and Sasha wraps her arms around her and pulls Azu’s head close into her chest and Azu feels stifled, feels surrounded, feels  _ safe.  _ Sasha learns not to balk at the way the earth, the dirt, the  _ worms  _ bends around her, and Azu does what she can to keep the dirt away from her skin, to pull it back when Sasha needs a break, to give them space to walk where the walls don’t brush against their skin. 

It’s a work in progress, and sometimes the only way for them to communicate is through a layer of dirt. Sometimes Sasha gets too tense walking through the earth and disappears for days on end, free-falling as she tries to burn the feeling of the air rushing past her into her skin. Sometimes Azu feels so exposed by the open air that she has to sink back into the ground for a week, unmoving as she lets herself re-acclimate to the dirt, to the pressure surrounding her and making her feel safe again. 

Maybe this is what love is, for her and Sasha. She hadn’t realised that she could still feel it, could feel anything other than a deep satisfaction at the fear coursing through a human’s blood, but if this is what love is like in this world, with this version of both of them existing… she’s happy enough with it. 

**Author's Note:**

> lmk what u think !! or hmu at ohallows on tumblr i love talking abt rqg


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